Service Electric inks TV deal with Phantoms

FINE TUNING

Local cable provider will broadcast all home games of the local ice hockey team, but maintain high school schedule.

March 01, 2012|Keith Groller

To no one's surprise, Service Electric Cable has snagged the Phantoms, our incoming minor league ice hockey team, with an exclusive contract that will have every home Phantoms game at the new downtown Allentown arena being broadcast live to more than 100,000 area subscribers.

Even more than a year-and-a-half before the first puck drops on Center Square, the deal is done and was announced last week.

Service Electric is very aggressive about going out and making deals with the local professional franchises.

Over the years, TV2 has been the exclusive home of Ambassadors baseball, Valley Dawgs hoops, Outlawz arena football, the poorly named Philadelphia Force — which played its softball games in Allentown — and of course, SECTV still has ongoing relationships with the IronPigs Triple-A baseball team, the Steelhawks Indoor Football League franchise and the F.C. Sonic pro soccer team.

Just last week, Service Electric announced it will also do 25 Reading Phillies games.

At some point, you wonder, will there be too many things to televise and will the local high school coverage — still the bread and butter when it comes to interest — suffer.

Not to worry, said Service Electric 2 Sports general manager Andy Himmelwright.

"Don't forget everything else we do. … the Velodrome, SportsFest, the Stellar Tournament, Musikfest, Mayfair, the community Halloween parades, Lehigh, Moravian, Muhlenberg and DeSales sports," Himmelwright said. "We feel we make a tremendous impact in terms of community service. This is our way of giving back to our customers.

"If they can't make it out to a game, they still have the opportunity to view it. We think by televising these events, we're creating more interest in them."

But the bottom line is that even with an increased number of teams and events to get on the air, Service Electric will keep high school sports front and center.

"It's a commitment that is not changing," Himmelwright said. "It never has and it never will. It keeps expanding. It's why we created our daily 'SportsScene' show as a way to showcase and spotlight some of the high school sports — swimming, field hockey, soccer, softball, baseball, track and field — that typically don't receive live game coverage.

"Our commitment won't change. Absolutely not. Mr. [John] Walson, [Service Electric's president] made the commitment to local origination programming and that will always be the case."

Himmelwright said that the availability of a second channel to show local programming — a TV2 No. 2, if you will — makes it possible for Service Electric to accommodate a new entity such as the Phantoms.

Not that it won't seem like fitting together the pieces of a massive jigsaw puzzle at times.

Most of the Phantoms games are on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and obviously Fridays and Saturdays are big nights during the high school football and basketball seasons," Himmelwright said. "That's where the second channel is going to come into play. A third production truck is a big help when it comes to high school coverage. We can do one high school event live, and another on tape-delay."

Himmelwright said the deal calls for all 40 regular-season Phantoms games to be shown live. Service Electric is also going to do pregame and postgame shows and Himmelwright said it's likely there will be a weekly half-hour show devoted to the team during the regular season, much like some of the teams have now.

"We like to do that to promote upcoming attractions because we want to get the people to come out to the events," Himmelwright said.

Himmelwright said Service Electric will provide the Phantoms announcers and he's looking for one of the Flyers alumni to handle to the color analysis.

"Several of them live around the Lehigh Valley," he said. "The nice thing about hockey is that we'll have more access to the players as they come up and down from the big team in Philadelphia. We're looking forward to it."

Did you notice? It was the race that took forever to get started, and then took forever to end, but Fox is saying that the Sunday-Monday Daytona 500 marathon was the most-watched race in Fox history, attracting 35.4 million viewers at some point.

Fox also said that it won Monday night's prime-time battle in the key adults 18-49 demographic, besting shows like ABC's "The Bachelor," NBC's "The Voice" and CBS's "How I Met Your Mother."

The all-time record for a Daytona audience is the 2006 race, which attracted 37 million viewers on NBC.

ESPN was also pleased with the start of the NASCAR Nationwide Series at Daytona.

With an average of 4.4 million people watching, the Nationwide opener at Daytona became the most-viewed race ever for the series on ESPN.

The audience was up 37 percent from last year. The Danica factor already working in ESPN's favor?

PHiL it up: PHL17, the Tribune-owned independent channel, is back for another season of Phillies baseball.

PHL17 leads off with three preseason games beginning on March 11 when the Phillies take on the Tigers. It will also have 45 regular-season games beginning with the season opener against the Pirates on April 5.

Prior to the game, PHL17 will air the "2011 Phillies Yearbook: Making History", a look back at the historic 102-win regular season followed by the pregame special Phillies Live: Opening Day.